Nice to meet you Robbie.
On 21 Oct. you wrote to Dallas.
> Others have another interpretation of the famous Latin phrase:
> descartes' "i think therefore i am" quite misses the mark. "i think,
> but i'm not my thoughts" comes closer.
Why Pirsig thinks Descartes' sentence misses the mark is that it
misses social value's influences on his seemingly objective
(intellectual) observation.
(LILA)
Our scientific description of nature is always culturally
derived. Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes
us to hear. The selection of which inorganic patterns to
observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of
social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of
biological patterns of value.
See, he hammers on the point of social value being intellect's
parent and influences its content.
Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically
shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual
level of evolution from the social level of evolution, but
would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth
century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would
anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to
him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his
name in history? If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth
century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I
am," he would have been correct.
Here he introduces Descartes as an intellectual who is blind to
this fact. However, the way he uses China I'm not sure what
means, he obviously regards the Chinese a culture where
intellectual level isn't dominant, but is it pre- or post intellect?
The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship
between intellect and society, subject and object, mind
and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system
of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological
values; subjects are social and intellectual values. They
are not two mysterious universes that go floating around
in some subject-object dream that allows them no real
contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact
evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship
is also a moral one.
But this solution has caused much trouble. First of all it's not only
intellect that denies its parent, it's a major MOQ tenet that ALL
levels hate each other, this "conflict" is not supposed to be
solved, only understood from MOQ's meta-level (that may be a
solution though)
Furthermore, it makes inorgany and biology look like "partners"
within an OBJECTIVE realm and society and intellect within a
SUBJECTIVE, and makes the conflict between the two realms.
There truly is a S/O conflict but that one is what the MOQ is
supposed to solve not CREATE!
The obvious SOL-ution of the S/O conflict is by regarding the
intellectual level as the value of the S/O distinction (something
most of LILA indicates) thereby it goes poof! In the MOQ the S/O
isn't the basic - metaphysical - divide, but the highest static
VALUE!
Within this evolutionary relationship it is possible to see
that intellect has functions that predate science and
philosophy. The intellect's evolutionary purpose has never
been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe.
That is a relatively recent fad. Its historical purpose has
been to help a society find food, detect danger, and
defeat enemies. It can do this well or poorly, depending
on the concepts it invents for this purpose.
Pirsig had it in his hand but let it slip. According to the MOQ all
levels start as an unstable pattern of the lower level, but as long
as (in this case) the unstable social pattern served society it was
SOCIAL, it did not become INTELLECTUAL until it "took off on a
purpose of its own (as Pirsig so elegantly put it) and THEN its
purpose truly became "that of discovering an ultimate meaning of
the universe", namely the Greek philosophers' search for eternal
principles, for objective and ultimate truth. It was SOM in ZAMM
but should clearly have become the intellectual level in the MOQ.
Not much about buddhism, but I stick to to the MOQ
Bo
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